Thursday, February 01, 2018

Open Source Virtual Life Project Successfully Presented at the Legendary Royal Society Scientific Body

Remember the OpenWorm Project that I wrote about a few years ago? It's a collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form from the cellular level to the point where it's able to have basic problem-solving abilities. This week the project (like the worm, based on the c. elegans nematode) evolved to a new milestone, when team leaders got to present their work at the Royal Society in London. Yes, the same Society whose fellows include Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking. The meeting was organized by OpenWorm’s scientific advisor John White (father of the connectome neural map), a fellow of the Royal Society, and according to Open Worm co-founder Giovanni Idili, it was a rousing success:

“It was a two days back to back conference with loads of c. elegans modelers and experimentalists with OpenWorm talks peppered in, a meeting first of its kind with some great work presented and generating a lot of discourse between communities that historically don’t talk to each other much (biologists and computational modelers)," he tells me. "The Royal Society is gonna publish a special issue with a paper for each of the talks too.”

Specifically, this paper on virtual life will be published in a future issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions B, whose past contributors include Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, and Alan Turing. So yes, this is pretty impressive.

“Kind of a big deal for us to go from scrappy open source, open science project to hosting a meeting at the Royal Society,” as Idili puts it. “But we’re still scrappy and proudly so!” (Speaking of open source, one of Open Worm's first contributors is John Hurliman, an OpenSim pioneer.)

While I wrote “virtual life” up there, by the way, the creators are a bit more cautious around that term:

“It’s a bit of a ‘no no’ in the community of scientist to talk about simulating life at least in c. elegans because everybody is working with subsets of the brain to try and understand what various circuits do,” says Idili. “Eventually we’ll throw all the neurons in but it’s useless for example to throw all of them in if your simulation is limited to locomotion and doesn’t take into account, say, sensation, metabolism etc. you end up with a bunch of neurons that sit there and can do nothing.”

In fact, he adds, “One guy in the audience brought up ‘what is life’ kind of questions and embarrassing silence ensued. In general it was a meeting where the focus was on simulating some behavior (crawling, swimming) or understanding how behaviors arise in the real worm, reality is nobody is doing more than a few behaviors and virtually everybody is focusing on backward / forward locomotion. There are a few good models but it’s a tough nut to crack if you want to demonstrate that behavior is arising from the same mechanism as the real animal.

“It’s a long road to get these things built in one at the time and hook up more and more of the brain. It’s the ultimate long term goal of the project but we are very humble and realistic about the fact that it might take decades to get there.”